Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales Fragments V and VI

The Squire's Tale:

After the Host requests a tale of love, the Squire launches into what seems to be the beginnings of an extended romance. The tale is unfinished after only two parts, without the clear conflict being introduced, and is quite short. What is present, however, is the marvelous gifts that the knight from Arabia brings to Cambuscan's court, namely a brass horse that can travel at miraculous speeds and fly, a mirror that can reveal who is one's friends and foes, and a ring that allows one to communicate with birds. While the second part spends time with Cambuscan's daughter and the ring, the real focus and attention seems to be on the horse. This mechanical wonder is also the focus of scholarly readings of orientalism in The Canterbury Tales. regardless, Chaucer seems to have intended to finish the tale as the next opens with a compliment of the Squire's tale telling abilities.

The Franklin's Tale:

The Franklin's Tale opens with a brief discussion of mastery in a manner that suggests it will counter The Wife of Bath's Tale. The tale itself involves a knight who promises his wife mastery and his wife, Dorigen, promises to stay true to him. While the knight is away for an extended time, however, she has great sorrow over his absence. During a party intended to raise her spirits, Dorigen is wooed by a squire who is madly in love with her. Upset about the rocks surrounding their shore that could prevent her husband's safe return, Dorigen makes a somewhat rash promise that if the squire can remove all the rocks on every shore around England, she will love him best. Shortly thereafter, her husband returns, and all seems well. In the meantime, however, the squire has made contact with a scholar knowledgeable in astrology who can make the rocks appear to disappear. The squire returns to collect on Dorigen's promise and, distraught, Dorigen presents the dilemma to her husband. The knight decides he'd rather live in misery than have her betray her word, but the squire, seeing their sorrow, releases Dorigen from her promise. This is often tied to the rash boon folk tradition, despite the seeming impossibility of the promise she offered. 

The Physician's Tale: 

The Physician's Tale runs very much like a virgin martyr tale. Virginius' daughter is spotted by a Roman nobleman who desires her and hatches a plot to obtain her despite her will. This nobleman, Appius, uses bribes to accuse Virginius of stealing his slave, who he says is Virginius' own daughter. Seeing no other way out of the situation, Virginius tells his daughter that he must kill her in order to preserve her chastity. He beheads her, presents the head to the Roman court, and the people rise up to defend the knight and his just cause. So everything ends happily. Except for the little detail of Virginius' daughter. 

The Pardoner's Tale:

Another heavily anthologized text, The Pardoner's Tale has received a substantial amount of critical attention. I've got to say, rereading this text I have the strong desire to play a character based around the Pardoner. His blatant corruption and utter self interest are strangely compelling. 

After an introduction that establishes the Pardoner's complete interest in his own financial gain, the tale itself involves a trio of drunken patrons who decide that they should set out to kill the cause of so much death around town, Death himself. They travel in search of their target and meet up with an old man. Hearing their goal, the old man tells them they can find death at the base of a tree, which is filled with gold. Of course avarice takes over and leads to a triple homicide, each member of the trio killing the others to gain a larger share of the gold for themselves. It is interesting that the Pardoner tells a tale damning the very sin he is most guilty of, or perhaps, considering the Pardoner, not all that surprising at all. 

D. Vance Smith, "Merchants in the Margin."

Vance Smith, D. "Merchants in the Margin: Writing and the National Domestic of Piers Plowman." Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

Vance Smith's chapter considers the role of economic "imaginary" and merchants in The Vision of Piers the Plowman. Vance Smith argues that the apology added to Passus V represents a larger concern of economics, money, and merchants in the text. Specifically, Vance Smith argues that the role of economic surplus, that which is not needed to sustain the household, creates anxiety over the management of profit. Thus, the debate between Lady Mede and Conscience is also a discussion of how to manage surplus and, despite Mede's statement that the exchange of mede is not trade, merchants. Rather than a solely negative approach, however, Vance Smith suggests that the text is at times supportive of merchants and that, in the long run, the economy of salvation is one that provides merchants a methodology to manage surplus. Rather than suggesting that this is a neatly tied up issue in the text, however, Vance Smith reads the plowing of the half acre and tearing of the pardon as attempts to ameliorate the merchant that ultimately fail. Arguing that the half acre ultimately represents mercantile interests by pulling in Aristotelian perceptions of the oikos, Vance Smith comes to argue that exchange, as with many other near "solutions" in Piers Plowman, ultimately fails and places the reader back at square one. 

While I find Vance Smith's reading of economic thought and history intriguing and very useful, this chapter ultimately balances on whether or not one is willing to consider a positive role of merchants in Piers Plowman. Vance Smith's arguments in that regard are interesting and very much worth considering, but I do not find myself ultimately convinced. Despite my hesitation, however, Vance Smith's scholarship is very elucidating. Edward III's relationship with merchants, for example, is an intriguing section that adds complexity to my other readings on mercantile history. Furthermore, Vance Smith certainly demonstrates his excellent handle on Aristotelian economic thought and how it interacts with the economic history of the fourteenth century. I may not be persuaded by the main thesis, but the data presented throughout this chapter is nonetheless valuable. 

Geoffrey Chaucer, House of Fame

House of Fame:

House of Fame seems to be the Chaucerian text that is most interested in writing and the role of narrative. The poem opens as another dream vision, the narrator first awaking in a temple of glass. On this temple is, roughly, the Aeneid which the narrator recounts. After this long recounting, the narrator is taken in a large eagle's claws, sent from Jupiter, to reward the narrator for his poetic labor for Cupid and Venus. After wondering at the experience of flying and passing on an astrology lesson, the narrator is dropped off in the House of Fame, where all sound, and thus all poetry and song, eventually arrives. The narrator witness Fame herself having court, and is finally taken to a new house by the eagle, where truth and lies leave by window and are intertwined, and the unfinished text ends with the entrance of a new undefined figure. Primarily my interests in this text lie with the digression about Dido and other classical women, the role of Fame as a Fortuna like figure, and the physicality of sounds/words/poetry. 

In the initial dream vision, the narrator recounts Virgil's Aeneid, but digresses to expand for a few hundred lines on Dido, which itself transitions into a discussion of untrue men. On one hand this is part of a text that is heavily embedded in the classical tradition, perhaps as much or more than many other of Chaucer's texts. Yet, in a section that very quickly runs through the events of Virgil's lengthy text, this is a substantial amount of attention to pay to Dido, especially in lamenting her poor treatment. As with the Legend of Goode Women and The Canterbury Tales, this is another text that demonstrates Chaucer's larger interest in women, and in many cases defends their plights.

Once in the House of Fame, the lady of the house is a somewhat frightening figure, who easily grants either fame or banishment/death to her petitioners without any consistency. Some who have toiled justly are dismissed, and others who have produced no labor are granted great amounts of fame. Fame, then, functions like the Fortuna in Boethius, a flippant figure who is marked by her inconsistency (it is also worth noting that Chaucer specifically invokes Boethius earlier in the text). When given the chance to present himself to Fame, the narrator declines out of apparent fear, something that I could not blame him for. 

In an interesting initial discussion between the narrator and the eagle, sound is treated as a physical substance that can be marred by pipes but, eventually, finds its way to the House of Fame. Once there, however, the sound itself seems to have a physical aspect as the eagle tells the narrator that each sound becomes a representation of the one who produced it, as if that person were himself presented to Fame. Thus, when Fame pronounces a petitioner either lauded or banished to obscurity, she is advancing or destroying a physical copy of the person who produced the sound. Even some of the language used to describe banishment is that of death, making an interesting point about how sound, words, and poetry are treated. Does good poetry rise to its proper place and bad poetry fall to the depths?

Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England.

Crassons, Kate. The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Print.

Crassons' text considers the representational aspect of poverty in late medieval England, specifically in how various groups appropriate the "claims to poverty" for their respective ideological purposes. According to Crassons, "this book does not argue that poverty falls from a virtue to a vice so much as it shows how that decline occurs in a variety of discursive arenas" (12). Over the course of this period, poverty shifts from being seen as a theological virtue to a state of vice that is only lived out by those choosing not to engage in wholesome labor. The emphasis from Crassons' text is on the "claim," or the representational aspect of poverty. The Franciscans' willing taking on of poverty, early in the period, is a move towards solidarity with the poor that allows for separation from the trappings of the material world. However, the later moves to control the agency and wages of laborers in post-plague England shifts the rhetoric in the other direction, suggesting that poverty is simply the state of those too lazy to engage in honest labor, as is seen in the Labor Statutes and in various fourteenth century sermons. In either case, the rhetoric seems to leave the actually impoverished in the lurch, either by having alms money that would normally have supported charitable purposes going to support a willingly poor clergy or to having those in the state of poverty under scrutiny of fraud. Crassons considers this role of the claims of poverty in a range of Middle English texts, using them as guideposts to plot the ideological shift.

While Crassons' readings of Piers Plowman and the Book of Margery Kempe are interesting in and of themselves, what strikes me in this reading is how similarly the rhetoric she considers mirrors current political discussion in the U.S.A. Over the past fifty years rhetoric has shifted from provided the poor with aid to get back on their feet to blaming them, suggesting that the impoverished are in their states purely due to their own poor decision making. Much as how talking points from politicians and pundits alike push these rhetorical positions, Crassons reads how similar ideology is pushed in the York plays, both modern and medieval instances backed by business interests. I'd rather not make a huge political rant here, but this does suggest an interesting comparative nature between Crassons' points and current events.

Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools.

Langholm, Odd. Economics in the Medieval Schools. New York, NY: Brill, 1992. Print.

Langholm's text considers the shift in medieval economic thought as expressed among scholastics at the University of Paris in, roughly, the thirteenth century. Taken a somewhat unpopular perspective that views "history as anticipation" (5), Langholm argues that this period of scholastic writing represents an evolution in economic thought that sets up the economic developments that would follow in the fourteenth century. The majority of Langholm's text is thus a survey of individuals in this period at the University of Paris, or closely connected thereto, who write on what would be, in a modern context, called economics. Langholm focuses on five genres for this survey, namely the confessional manual, the quodlibet, the summa, the commentary and the economic treatise.

Langholm's "anticipatory" perspective is somewhat problematic given contemporary perspectives on scholarship as the argument of an evolutionary economic perspective falls rather fully in the construction of grand historical narratives that John Watt castigates. However, the depth of Langholm's consideration of these texts, especially several that are otherwise unconsidered in scholarship, are invaluable for studies in medieval economic thought. Much of what Langholm's overall narrative plots out follows some of what Diana Wood sets up as the changing perception to economics in late medieval Europe, but the focus on the University of Paris is both a positive and negative aspect, as it allows for in depth consideration but possibly runs the risk of being intellectually isolated from other possible influences.

As a final note, the "scholastic frame of literary reference" that Langholm constructs as a triangle is instructive. (25). Langholm sets the corners of the triangles as the Bible/Church Fathers, Aristotle (the Ethics and Poetics), and Roman law. Diana Wood makes much of the necessity to consider the theological alongside the Aristotelian when considering medieval economic thought, but Langholm's point about Roman law are also vital, especially in a setting where Roman law was often seen as a necessary source of precedence. Some of Langholm's larger points may be slightly problematic, but the research is impeccable and vital.

Geoffrey Chaucer, Book of the Duchess and Parliament of Fowles

Book of the Duchess:

Book of the Duchess has a slew of potentially interesting elements in it. The basic plot involves a narrator who, having trouble sleeping, asks for a romance to read. After recounting the details of said romance, he falls asleep and, in dreaming, finds himself on a hunt. In the process of chasing down the white hart, itself a constant image in romance, the narrator finds a sorrowful knight. The knight has followed the etiquette of courtly love to, after great effort, attain the favor of his lady. Unfortunately, said lady has died, leaving the knight in his sorrowful state.

The text contains a series of critically interesting aspects. My BA adviser is interested in the game theory elements of text, specifically around Fortuna and the game of chess. The plotting of courtly love is also indicative of romance elements, especially in the language of how the lady's appearance acts violently upon the knight seeing her. And, of course, the dream vision narrative here is interesting, especially as it comes out that the lady's name was "White," drawing connections to the white hart that is being hunted.

Parliament of Fowles:

The Parliamant of Fowles opens with another dream vision, begat from the narrator's reading, only this time the narrator travels to the temple of Venus. There, after the narrator sees several wondrous things, Nature convenes a parliament of birds to set their mates with the coming spring. There is, however, competition among three tercel eagles for the affections of a single female formel eagle. This disagreement leads to the chiming in from all of the other "lower" birds over who should be paired until, eventually,. Nature calls things to order and places the choice in the hands of the formel eagle.

The courtly love elements in this text are a bit less emphasized than in the Book of the Duchess, but are still there as three eagles contend for the formel's affections. The aspect that stands out most to me is the discussion between the various birds who are sorted into a hierarchy according to their dietary habits. This feels like either an invocation of the estates model or the greater chain of being. There also seems to be a dig at parliamentary proceedings here, as the parliament turns into a non-functioning cacophony that only Nature, the ruling monarch of that body, can step in and set to proper order.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Fragment II and III

The Man of Law's Tale:

The Man of Law's Tale is another instance of the Constance tradition, involving a young maiden who is banished to see multiple times on a rudderless boat. While this is the version of the tale that perhaps most modern readers are familiar, I'm actually more familiar with the Breton Lay Emare. Nonetheless, this tale emphasizes Constance's, well, constancy. Because Constance holds to her faith and puts her trust in God, she is eventually delivered from the hardships imposed by her various mothers-in-law and, in the end, all are reunited happily. Also, mothers-in-law are really, seriously, impossibly mean in this text, possibly highlighting the change in social and political influence that occurs when a new queen enters the mix.

The Wife of Bath:

I can, and have, go on about The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale for hours. This is easily one of my favorite pieces of Middle English literature and is the text I've worked with the most in literature studies. Regardless, the prologue is interesting because of the Wife of Bath herself. She constructs a sexual/marital economy in which she exchanges sex for authority/wealth from her first three husbands, with her bargaining position shifting significantly for the last two husbands. Dame Alice engages with misogynistic rhetoric, appropriating it to her own ends, and depending on the critic she is either a subversive proto-feminist, a comical caricature intentionally misreading theology, or a savvy businesswoman who uses that experience to obtain agency. The tale itself mirrors much of the sentiment from the prologue, involving another version of the Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. In this text, however, the loathly lady emphasizes a form of gentility based on action rather than birth, aiding in the rehabilitation of the knight's actions (which is itself another change as the knight has committed rape, an ultimate example of poor treatment of women, and this causes the death sentence that only the loathly lady can save him from). I'll hold off any further expansion of this section, as I'd likely get little else done today.

The Friar's Tale:

After the Wife of Bath has concluded her tale, the Friar steps in and specifically takes a stab at the Summoner with his tale. The Host attempts to calm them, but the Friar moves forward regardless. The tale itself involves a summoner, no surprise, that is incredibly corrupt. The summoner carries summons to court that, for bribes of various sort, he overlooks and allows individuals to go free. Before long the summoner of the tale is joined by a fellow who turns out to be a demon from hell. Working together to extract what respective profit they can from innocents, the summoner decides to one-up the demon by extorting goods from an old woman whom he has nothing on. Upset, the old woman damns the summoner to hell, which the demon gladly acts upon. Aside from emphasizing potential corruption in clerical offices, this tale is most interesting for the back and forth quetying that goes on between Friar and Summoner.

The Summoner's Tale:

A direct rebuttal (pun intended) to The Friar's Tale, The Summoner's Tale deals with a friar who schmoozes around, convincing others to donate goods and wealth based on his sermons and all too convenient visions. This friar returns to a sickened Thomas, who has been all too willing to donate before, and tries to push the ill man in to donating towards the building of a new cloister. This friar uses tales himself to try to push Thomas towards donating, but the sick man realizes the hypocrisy at hand and agrees to give the friar a donation that must be equally split among the friar and his brothers: a fart. The tale concludes with a quite funny discussion of how one should go about splitting a fart evenly. In the end, it appears that the Summoner has gotten the best of the exchange.